Australian SCO complaints 'alive'

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Two complaints filed with the Australian consumer watchdog
against the SCO Group are still active, contrary to SCO claims, the
two complainants said today.

A US-based SCO spokesman, Blake Stowell, claimed in a
statement last week that one case had become inactive.

Con Zymaris, on behalf of an advocacy group, Open Source
Victoria, had
asked the ACCC to investigate SCO's activities in light of
"unsubstantiated claims and extortive legal threats for money"
against possibly hundreds of thousands of Australians.

And Leon Brooks, of the West Australian firm CyberKnights, claimed that
SCO's "unfounded" statements about software around which
CyberKnights had based its business, and its "claims for an
additional licence fee of typically AUD$999 per computer" was
causing the Perth firm financial loss. The Western Australian firm
sells and services free and open-source software.

Mr Brooks said today that his case, filed in March last year,
was in a holding pattern - but there was no intimation that it had
been closed down.

"It's some time since I was last in touch with the Australian
Competition and Consumer Commission. But the case has not been
dismissed," he said.

Mr Zymaris said OSV's complaint was very much alive, and the
ACCC had indicated that since the matter was a complex one, it
would be waiting until the SCO Group's case against IBM was
resolved before responding.

SCO filed a
case against IBM in the US in March 2003 claiming breach of
contract. It also claimed that Linux was an unauthorised derivative
of UNIX, and warned commercial
Linux users that they could be legally liable for violation of
intellectual property.

SCO later expanded its claims against IBM to $US3 billion in
June 2003, when it said it was withdrawing IBM's
licence for its own Unix, AIX.

In July last year, SCO demanded that Linux
users obtain licences for using what it claims to be its own UNIX
code. Later the same year, SCO extended the deadline
for obtaining these licences.

"The last time I was in touch with the ACCC was five or six
months back in connection with a different matter," Mr Zymaris
said.

"But even then, the ACCC people asked me about the SCO
complaint. They are waiting for the IBM court action to end and
then we will have their response."